Despite its sculptural attributes, I have never thought of architecture as ‘sculpture’ per se. Therefore, I would rather think of the Guggenheim’s ‘Retrospective Sculpture’ as an installation - an architectural experiment in design and fabrication.

In the summer of 2001, the Guggenheim Museum in New York decided to host a retrospective on the work of Gehry Partners. Along with the retrospective, the office was asked to design an installation for Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic rotunda. We suspended giant sail-like pieces of metal fabric from the building’s roof, creating a veil between the rotunda and the surrounding galleries along the spiral ramp.

In the center of the rotunda, we proposed to make a structure large enough for visitors to enter, so that they could experience an architectural space-within-a-space designed by the office.

We only had 6 months from design to installation. Given this short timeframe, we decided that using fabric – a type of industrial felt - to model the form would be the quickest way to arrive at a final design (image on left). This felt model was then digitized to create a working computer dataset (image on right).

From the digitized data, we made the first computer model with the office’s preferred software - CATIA. As is typical with the first iteration, the surface of this computer model was full of bumps and inconsistencies.

Using the analytical tools in CATIA, we rationalized the unresolved geometry of the first digitized model (image on left) to create a final computer model with smooth surfaces suitable for fabrication (image in center). We planned to clad the full-scale installation in stainless steel panels (image on right).

In order to confirm the surface geometry from the computer model and to ensure that our concept was achievable at full-scale, we decided to make a mock-up of a small section of the design. The armature for this mock-up was created with high-density foam by a CNC milling machine.

A layer of fiberglass was then applied on top of the foam armature to create a smooth surface. This layer of fiberglass would provide the surface for attaching each of the stainless steel panels.

Small vinyl tiles were used to test whether the metal panels would conform to the surface geometry of the fiberglass. This process also allowed us to reduce the dimensions of the panels to just 6 standard sizes.

The final stainless steel panels were attached to the fiberglass layer using industrial strength 3M tape, achieving a smooth surface as we had envisioned in the computer model.

We proceeded to full-scale fabrication with the entire ‘sculpture’ being broken down into segments that could be transportable by truck from California to New York City.

Each of these segments were then re-assembled, layer-by-layer to create the full-size armature for the ‘sculpture’.

As had been the case during the mock-up, a layer of fiberglass was applied to the armature to create the final surface. After the surface was created, the milled armature would be removed with only the fiberglass layer remaining.

This fiberglass layer, composed of panels the same dimension as the armature segments, was then dissembled and stored in a warehouse ready for transportation to the museum.

Although the plan to install the ‘Sculpture’ in the rotunda was abandoned in the last minute by the Guggenheim, it was finally realized at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in 2003, when the museum hosted its own retrospective of the office’s work. The height of the gallery at MOCA required the sculpture to be hung horizontally. Without its stainless-steel panels, the ‘sculpture’ appeared light and translucent.